I updated cairo to 1.4.8 with newspr patch, it was available from XEffects-overlay this morning. It really destroyed part of my font-rendering (no more window titles, just squares), checking the logs showed some pango-warning about bad shape (can't remember exactly). Tried all kind of solution that was available on the web, but could only resolve it by masking cairo-1.4.8 and downgrading again.

That explains why Firefox is really screwed up. I will immediately downgrade._________________... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...

I updated cairo to 1.4.8 with newspr patch, it was available from XEffects-overlay this morning. It really destroyed part of my font-rendering (no more window titles, just squares), checking the logs showed some pango-warning about bad shape (can't remember exactly).

I had the same problem after I hand-modified this thread's patch to apply against 1.4.8. I guess something important changed in cairo-ft-font.c.

Try using the patch I mentioned earlier; it hasn't given me these problems._________________Have you ever seen Geneva™, Monaco®, or New York®?
Geneva, Monaco, and New York are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., some registered in the U.S. and other countries.

Can anyone confirm, that the new patch fixes the problem? As Vlad stated above, cairo-1.4.8 seems to be broken even without the old x-effects patch, so the new patch would have to fix it in addition to providing newspr...
Sorry, I haven't got the time for a test myself at the moment.

Ok, now this is plain **weird**. I just copied some fonts from my windows box to a folder /usr/share/fonts/win (made readeable and put into xorg.conf) - restarted X - and now the rectangular boxes are back (and a warning about Tahoma, the usual Pango message...). If move the directory away (so that X doesn't know where it is) and restart X, the Gtk applications are back and rendering fonts as usual...

Edit: It seems it was a permissions and a fonts.dir issue. Needed to update font.dir by running mkfontdir and then adjusting permissions on the directory. But the symptoms were exactly the same... >_< Now that wasn't a cairo 1.4.8 issue

Your problem sounds just like other users, however, if you have the update cairo + patch from the overlay, the problem is fixed. So, I am unsure why you are seeing this.

You may want to try and re-emerge pango and gtk+ (emerge -1v pango gtk+).

Did this happen with cairo 1.4.6? Did you only recently start using the newspr use flag and the xeffects overlay, or have you had this newspr previously working under cairo 1.4.6?_________________If God were a pickle, I'd still say "no pickle on my burger".
http://roderick-greening.blogspot.com/

_________________... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...

Thanks._________________... Morpheus: What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you 're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain...

In DE's like Gnome, Xfce or KDE, find the control panel option for User Interface/Fonts (or similar), and then turn on subpixel rendering (on LCD monitors) and full hinting at 96x96 DPI (for LCD and Laptop screens again). The order of colours you want is usually RGB. That should fix it.

The font rendering is much better. I was quite annoyed by the fact that Windows XP looks better on my new LCD screen than Linux does, but now Linux's fonts are as good or better than Windows XP. This is a must have for anyone that is using a LCD with lower than 96 native DPI (most are).

I'm sorry but I just can't get it to work right in kde. Bit of background: I used to have great font rendering in gnome, but I recently b0rked my install and decided to try kde for a change.
However I still haven't been able to get proper anti-aliasing working.
I have an IBM T42 laptop, which has a 15", 1400x1050 laptop screen. I measured the panel at ~304x228mm, and I think this means the DPI of this screen is 117 (1400/(304/25.4) = 116.9736842).

I think I have it almost working in GTK apps though, as it looks really nice in firefox (aside from the fonts being to large/small because of DPI (I think). Is there anyway to set the fonts for GTK apps from kde, or is there some config file I haven't found yet?)
To illustrate the problem (since I can't really describe it well) I made this screenshot. (left: firefox, right: kcontrol)
The best I can describe it is that the letters are rendered off-pixel-center... the 'stalk' from the 'd' is smeared across 3(!) pixels in KDE, whereas firefox perfectly renders it one pixel wide.
I've been playing with the settings in "KDE Control Center" -> "Fonts" -> "Use anti-aliasing for fonts", but I just can't get it right. As far as I can tell all that those settings do is change some things in ~/.fonts.conf, which I've set to the settings posted in the wiki.

Any help would be truly appreciated, my eyes are starting to hurt from the blurry fuglyness of kde ;(

pretty much everything that depends on cairo, libXft or freetype. We'll see if that helps

--edit:
Well, it hasn't helped. From what I've read the output from pango-view with the cairo backend should be identical to the output with the xft backend but it isn't. Same difference as in the screenshot
Please help, I can't take the blur anymore !_________________"Man fears the darkness, and so he scrapes away at the edges of it with fire."
- Rei Ayanami